What To Do About Satanic After-School Clubs

BY PATTI ARMSTRONG

The latest devilish tactic is Satanic clubs planned for public elementary schools across the country. The situation ultimately boils down to either allowing them in schools alongside Christian groups or agreeing to exclude all religious clubs.

Gone are the days when schools could say: No, this is evil and insane and it’s not going to happen here. Instead, it’s an all or nothing world—everyone or no one. Although the ultimate end game is to drive all religion from schools, for now, members of the Satanic Temple are making their point by moving to force schools to allow their clubs. It’s been a successful maneuver for them—driving Christian groups, monuments, and prayers out of public square lest we have to also host the devil.

Counteracting Christianity in Public Schools

According to a Washington Post article, leaders of the Satanic Temple gathered last month in Salem, Massachusetts to counteract Christian evangelical after-school religious groups. The Post quoted Doug Mesner, the Satanic Temple’s co-founder: “It’s critical that children understand that there are multiple perspectives on all issues, and that they have a choice in how they think.”

Their website warns against the evangelical Good News Clubs instilling a fear of Hell and the fact that allowing God into schools represents only one religious opinion. The plan is for Satanic chapter heads to petition schools to immediately allow the clubs. Leaders participating in this meeting were from New York, Boston, Utah, Arizona, Minneapolis, Detroit, San Jose, New Orleans, Pittsburgh and Florida. The promotional video for the clubs on their site is full of disturbing, odd behaviors with discordant, eerie sounds. I only looked at a few seconds, skipped ahead a few times and saw that the macabre theme continued throughout. Don’t waste your time but if you insist, at least first pray prayers of protection, especially the prayer to Saint Michael the Archangel.

Their website states that the Supreme Court ruled in 2001 in Good News Club v. Milford Central School that schools may not discriminate against religious speech if a religious organization wants to operate an after school club on their premises. After School Satan Clubs insist they also cannot be denied wherever Christian or any other religious clubs, operate. The Satanic Temple claims they don’t even really believe in the devil but are committed to scientific rationality. The curriculum for clubs sounds positively wholesome: develop reasoning and social skills, including a healthful snack, and literature and science lessons, creative learning activities, puzzle solving, and an art project. Parents need to sign a permission slip for students to join—a pact with the devil, so to say.

The Legal Straitjacket

In 2001, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that an after-school program cannot be excluded based on religious views. So now, there is a reported 3,560 Good News Clubs in more than 5 percent of the nation’s public elementary schools. The Satanic Temple plans to use the religious freedom laws to also get into schools. Their clubs promote benevolence and empathy and criticize the Good News Clubs as instilling fear and prejudice.

The Satanic Temple is using a blend of political activism that has served them well of late. In 2014, after the Supreme Court ruled that prayers before public meetings did not violate the First Amendment, the Satanic Temple offered to recite a prayer at an Arizona town meeting that usually opened with a Christian prayer. Instead, the town opted to skip prayers.

Last spring, Satanic materials were distributed in Colorado schools. Based on school policy that states that if they allow one type of literature to be passed out then they have to allow all types of information to be available to students. The Western Colorado Atheist and Freethinkers admitted that they were actually handing out controversial literature simply to force all religion out of schools. The Delta School District is already looking into revising their policy not to allow material on religion or beliefs.

Fairytales don’t tell children that dragons exist; children already know that dragons exist. Fairytales tell children that dragons can be killed. - G.K. Chesterton

Find the courage to proclaim Christ, … and the unchanging truths which have their foundation in Him. These are the truths that set us free! They are the truths which alone can guarantee respect for the inalienable dignity and rights of each man, woman and child in our world – including the most defenseless of all human beings, the unborn child in the mother’s womb. - Pope Benedict XVI

God does not choose the qualified. He qualifies the chosen - Madre Teresa de Calcutá

God gave us ten commandments, not ten thousand. Why? Why not a more complete list of specifics? Because he wanted freedom and variety. Why do you think he created so many persons? Why not just one? Because he loves different personalities. He wants his chorus to sing in harmony, but not in unison - Peter Kreeft

How monotonously alike all the great tyrants and conquerors have been; how gloriously different are the saints. - C.S Lewis

I would like to remind everyone, especially everyone engaged in boosting the world’s economic and social assets, that the primary capital to be safeguarded and valued is man, the human person in his or her integrity - Papa Bento XVI

If medieval people talked less about their own dignity, it is because they were more concerned about God´s dignity; if modern people talk more about it, it is because they are more concerned with themselves - Edward Feser

If you find a perfect parish, you go ahead and join her, it won't be perfect anymore - Matthew Kelly

In fact, a fine distinction could be a flat contradiction - G.K.Chesterton

It is true that I am of an older fashion; much that I love has been destroyed or sent into exile. G. K. Chesterton

Liberty cannot be established without morality, nor morality without faith - Alexis de Tocqueville

Mittite in Dexteram Navigii Rete, et Invenietis (João 21,6)

Multiculturalism is the doctrine which says that no culture can ever claim precedence over any other. So there can be no hierarchy of values, and no society can uphold its historic traditions and values against any challenge - Melaine Phillips

Napoleon himself announced to the Pope Pius VII that he was going to destroy the Church, to which Pius VII responded, “Oh my little man, you think you’re going to succeed in accomplishing what centuries of priests and bishops have tried and failed to do!”

Nowadays the devil has made such a mess of everything in the system of life on earth that the world will presently become uninhabitable for anybody but Saints. - Jacques Maritain

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience - Clive.S. Lewis

One was the view that stars are personal beings, governing our lives (astrology); the other the general theory that men have one mind between them (marxism); a view obviously opposed to immortality; that is, to individuality - G.K Chesteron

The difficulty of explaining “why I am Catholic” is that there are 10,000 reasons all amounting to one reason: that Catholicism is true. - GK Chesterton

The divide in Western civilization isn't between rich and poor, red vs. blue, or the uneducated vs. the educated. It's God. God is the dividing line. You either believe God loves each of us and grants us inalienable rights or you believe that everything is negotiable including life - Matthew Archbold

The obedient are not held captive by Holy Mother Church; it is the disobedient who are held captive by the world! - Diane M. Korzeniewski

The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him - Chesterton

The two most destructive heresies — and the two most popular — are angelism, confusing man with an angel by denying his likeness to animals, and animalism, confusing man with an animal by denying his likeness to angels - Peter Kreeft

The whole of history is a struggle between two loves: love of oneself to contempt of God; love of God to contempt of self, in martyrdom. We are in this struggle.

There are only three kinds of people: those who seek God and have found Him — these are wise and happy; those who seek God and have not yet found Him — these are wise and unhappy; and those who live without either seeking God or finding Him — and these are both unwise and unhappy. - Blaise Pascal

There are two sorts of people who might be tempted to think of death as a friend: those who think the nature of the human person has nothing to do with the body, and those who think it has everything to do with the body; in short, Platonists and materialists - Edward Feser

To avoid therefore the evils of inconstancy and versatility, ten thousand times worse than those of obstinacy and the blindest prejudice, we have consecrated the state - Edmund Burke on French Revolution

To be or not to be – that is the question”, then the massive medieval doctor (St. Thomas) does most certainly reply in voice of thunder, “To be – that is the answer - Chesterton

To speak of the Christian heritage of Europe bothers me. And for even greater reason, speaking of “Christian civilization.” Christianity was founded by people who could not have cared less about “Christian civilization.” What interested them was Christ, and the reverberations of his coming on the whole of human existence. Christians believed in Christ, not in Christianity itself; they were Christians, not “Christianists.” - Rémi Brague

We are moving toward a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as for certain and which has as its highest goal one's own ego and one's own desires. - Pope Benedict XVI

When a man is getting better, he understands more and more clearly the evil that’s left in him. When a man is getting worse, he understands his own badness less and less. - C.S.Lewis